Resources

The following are a few resources that I find invaluable in my business. I only recommend products and services that I’ve personally used and/or have extensive knowledge of.

Outsourcing

oDesk – I’ve been hiring on oDesk since 2009 and my contractors have billed over 2,000 hours. The types of jobs I’ve outsourced include: web developers (PHP/MySQL), web designers (front-end), logo designers, Virtual Assistants, customer service, and data entry peeps. I love the fact that it’s easy to find qualified candidates, you have good control over the terms on each contract, and there’s little risk (if you don’t do up-front payments). It’s also sweet how oDesk does screenshots of your contractors working so you can ensure they are staying on task. Here’s a review I wrote about the best outsourcing companies.

Keyword Research

Micro Nice Finder – Check out this Micro Niche Finder review I wrote. I’ve been using this program since early 2009 and it gets regularly updated as search engines and other services change their APIs. It saves me a ridiculous amount of time when doing keyword research.

Market Samurai – I don’t personally own this software but a couple friends do, and I’ve seen first-hand what it can do. It’s pretty frickin’ powerful and if I didn’t already own MNF (which has similar but less functionality) I’d definitely be a Market Samurai user.

Link Building / Back Linking

Linklicious – Here’s a post I made recently about Linklicious. I believe everyone should be using this highly affordable service. If you don’t use it, you aint WINNING, as the debaucherous Charlie Sheen would say.

Link Pushing – I described in detail what Link Pushing is all about here. This service is extremely easy to use. It doesn’t require hours of article writing and spinning like many other backlinking services do. Plus the owners keep adding new features. It’s not the cheapest out there (each URL “Push” costs about $6.50), but how much is your time worth? Plus the “natural” way your links are built is nice.

Backlinks Genie– This is most definitely a “Premium” backlinking service. And as such it aint cheap, you’re looking at $199/mo. But it sure is powerful. You setup a “project” to run each day. The project types include: 750 blog comments, 60 PR4+ profile linkwheel, 2000 XRumer profiles, 15 Web 2.0 sites, 100+ article directory submission, and a 3 or 4 day linkwheel combining the different types. If you’re serious about internet marketing, don’t want to mess around doing manual backlinking, and realize how important backlink variety is, this service is for you.

Hosting

DreamHost – I’ve been with these mofos since 2003, believe it or not. They’re currently hosting 59 domains and 31 subdomains for me. This account (which costs me about $100/year) is where the majority of my sites are hosted from. It’s “shared hosting” (hence the cheapness) which means that other folks are using the same servers as I am and the reliability / up-time isn’t spectacular due to resource battles. My more important, critical sites are hosted elsewhere using either VPS or dedicated servers. For the vast majority of websites shared hosting is sufficient. I find the DreamHost support to be quite good and I like their custom web panel better than cPanel.

HostGator – HostGator offers cheap shared hosting that’s easy to setup and fairly reliable. I’ve only been using them for about 4 months and haven’t had to use customer support yet so I can’t comment on how good they are. I do know that Warrior Forum members seem to prefer HostGator over other hosts so they must be doing something right.